Charles Saunders’ Imaro might be the best sword-and-sorcery successor to Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. In my opinion, Imaro beats C. L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry by a hair and Gardner F Fox’s Kothar the Barbarian by a mile. (Kothar’s pretty hacky but, I admit, I love it anyway.)
Imaro is a black hero in a vast fantasy Africa. The African plains setting gives Imaro plenty of room to flex his muscles, and plenty of beasts to overpower, sorcerers to kill, and ruins to plumb. Compared to this setting, fantasy Europe seems claustrophobic, but I guess there are more literary agents in fantasy Europe: Imaro is out of print. After its debut in the 70s, there wasn’t a reprint of the original Imaro stories until 2006. Now those are out of print as well. Look how expensive Imaro books are on Amazon: even used copies are $40 to $100. The cheapest way to get the first book is actually the $21 audiobook.
I have the 2006 reprints of books 1 and 2, and I thought that was all the Imaro there was. I just learned that Charles Saunders is still publishing Imaro books on Lulu. Maybe the best living sword-and-sorcery novelist doesn’t have a major book contract (??). And at $20 each, those Lulu books look damn cheap compared to the Amazon prices. The biggest barrier to entry for a new reader is finding a copy of Books 1 and 2.
Here’s my recommendation for the budget-conscious barbarian lover:
Buy the audiobook of Imaro for $21
Buy Imaro 2: The Quest for Kush audiobook for $14
Imaro 3: The Trail of Bohu on lulu for $20
Imaro 4: Dossouye on lulu for $20
Imaro 5: the Naama War on lulu for $20
I think Saunders gets overlooked because he is a little outside the “mainstream” of fantasy hacks. Not sure if it is the publishers (who assume the fantasy audience just wants more bad Tolkien & Howard imitators) or the readers (who really are as parochial and narrowly focused on pseudo-Medieval Europe as publishers think). Could it just be that the majority of fantasy fans, being white middle class guys, are turned off by Saunders’ setting?
I think I first saw his work in an issue of Dragon, and he also wrote a (non-Imaro) story for the sequel to Niven’s “The magic goes away” that was one of the stronger stories.
Thanks for the heads-up. Looks like it’ll be good inspiration for the Spears of the Dawn RPG.
Time to hit the used book stores!
@Anthony: yeah, imaro works well with spears of the dawn. It’s a good thing to read, or give to players who want to know what kinds of things are possible.
@Mike: yeah, I agree about fantasy fans. It is a white group and I’ve seen vacant stares when african fantasy is mentioned. I feel like a couple more awesome books could blow the lid off it though: “oriental adventures” is reasonably popular because people have familiarity with the tropes. The good thing about a lot of fantasy fans is once they find something they like, they are eager for more similar stuff: I know that’s how I am, and that’s how we ended up with so much tolkeiny stuff in the first place.
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It’s a shame too because African legends and myths have some really cool — and horrific — ideas. There’s a fairytale I read in a collection once where this gigantic caterpillar eats children and it’s up to the village women to slay it with grain-pestles and firewood axes, for example, which is crazy and totally D&D. There’s some great Zulu stuff too. The mini-series “Shaka Zulu” had some fantastic witchery going on.
PS. – TAHT IS ME, NUNYA.
HUGS AND KISSES BICH.
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Try reading some native american legends and tales. They’re pretty stream of consciousness and many times non-sensical with a heavy dose of non-sequiter added for good measure. Par example, mosquitos were created when a beaver chewed the head off a troll and then a hero/warrior threw the head into a swamp. For no reason. Yeah.
@Raoul — There are some awesome giants and what not in Amerindian myth too. But I think fairy tales of all cultures have some really “illogical” or even surrealist stuff. A lot of English fairy tales have no rhyme or reason — at least as they have been recorded. I imagine that if you could back far enough, most of the stories would have some sort of logic to them, it’s just lost through translation, retelling, etc. There is a legend from the Native Americans of the Pacific NW where a girl with a harelip (not a beaver) kills a giant by bashing her head in with a mallet after nailing her ears to the ground by pretending to be just piercing her ears (not a simple beheading) and the giant’s revenge is that her body dissolves into a swarm of mosquitoes. So there is some kind of trope there… maybe your story just lost the “revenge curse” element? Or the one I heard is an attempt to rationalize elements of your story? I wish I had the time to study folklore more seriously…
Hey, apparently ebook versions of Imaro are forthcoming!
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1462385-2013-b-9-10-imaro-saunders#comment_83651637
Also, speaking of Spears of the Dawn: SotD author Kevin Crawford’s new project looks interesting: a game/conversion kit that lets you play old D&D adventures with one DM and one player. Couples D&D??
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1637945166/scarlet-heroes-rpg
These comments about folktales and scholarship got me thinking about how fantasy might be one of the only responsible ways to “do” a certain kind of myth/folktale scholarship–there’s always that impulse to create a back-formation version of ancient history/culture/religion using the myths and stories we have left as clues (you know, like Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies, but also real-life writers like James Frazer and Robert Graves and Jessie Weston.) And that impulse usually results in kind of unsteady history. But to do a kind of creative scholarship through fantasy, which is less a guess than a wish, might be the best we can do! It seems like Saunders might have done that with Imaro, and Tolkien certainly did, and I’ve been rereading _The Mists of Avalon_ and realizing Marion Zimmer Bradley does a pretty nice job of tying together Arthurian myth with these little traces of (probably discredited) Briton history and theology we have lying around.
@Claire: That’s a very interesting point, and a great way to tie fantasy and sci-fi together as “speculative fiction”. Usually fantasy isn’t that speculative (“what if a farm boy could defeat a bad guy?” doesn’t count) but as an examination of the wispy knowledge on the ends of history, Mists of Avalon is sort of like a Ringworld or something else that does the same for science. Speculative fiction has definitely driven science research (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-inventions-inspired-by-science-fiction-128080674/?no-ist), and it would be interesting if fantasy could do the same for history scholarship.
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{Points to DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS sign.}
I contest your ranking (Kull #1, Conan #2) but to be fair I haven’t read Imaro yet. However, I am fully in the digital age so the lack of print copies is a non-issue. I mean, agent these public domain by now? That’s a free epub, beats a book IMO.
I don’t leave a ton of comments, but after browsing a few of the responses on the second best barbarian is out of print
No love for Cohen the Barbarian? I know Pratchett is comical, not serious, fantasy but come on that guy is all kinds of awesome.
Imaro is now back in print. Awesome!
http://www.amazon.com/Imaro-Book-Charles-R-Saunders-ebook/dp/B00NEU3KR8/